In His Name Devotionals
WHAT KIND OF GOD DO YOU NOT BELIEVE IN?
In His Name Devotionals
WHAT KIND OF GOD DO YOU NOT BELIEVE IN?
George Buttrick, former chaplain at Harvard, recalls that students would come into his office, plop down on a chair and declare, “I do not believe in God.” Buttrick would give this disarming reply, “Sit down and tell me what kind of God you do not believe in. I probably do not believe in that God either.”
Many people who reject Jesus are not rejecting Jesus, but a distortion of Him as presented by the church. To our everlasting shame, the watching world judges Jesus by a church whose history includes the Crusades, the Inquisition, the Conquistadors in Latin America, and a slave ship called the Good Ship Jesus.
In order to get to know Jesus, a person has to strip away layers of dust and grime applied by the church itself. To many, the image of Jesus is obscured by the racism, intolerance, and petty legalism of fundamentalist churches. A Russian or a European Catholic confronts a very different restoration process. “For not only dust, but also too much gold can cover up the true figure,” wrote Hans Kung about his own search. Many abandon the quest entirely; rebuffed by the church, they never make it to Jesus.
Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could somehow set aside church history, remove the church’s many layers of interpretation, and encounter the words of the Gospel accounts for the first time? Not everyone would accept Jesus—they did not in His own day—but at least people would not reject Him for the wrong reasons.
Once we are able to cut through the fog still clinging from our own upbringing, our opinion of Jesus changes remarkably. Brilliant, untamed, tender, creative, merciful, slippery, loving, irreducible, paradoxically humble—Jesus stands up to scrutiny. He is Who we should want our God to be.
